In a rather unorthodox move, the three members of the Orange County Board of Elections submitted four plans for the state Board of Elections to consider when determining the county’s early voting schedule.
The state board will make that decision on Thursday for Orange County and the 32 other counties across the Tar Heel state that could not come to a unanimous plan for early voting.
Orange County does differ from the other counties because of how many plans were ultimately submitted to the state board.
The local board members took public comment and discussed their individual plans during a more-than-two-hour meeting in mid-August.
Community members packed the board room to ask for expanded hours and sites and for the board to include Sunday voting.
After some haggling among board members, a plan was agreed to by two members of the board – one Democrat and one Republican. Because the other Republican member did not endorse the plan, he was able to submit his own minority plan to the state.
But the week following the meeting, two additional plans were submitted to the state – one from each of the two board members who originally agreed to a compromise. Orange County Board of Elections director Tracy Reams attributed the additional plans to a miscalculation of early voting hours in the compromise plan agreed to at the original meeting.
Others have pointed to a memo from North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse as reason for the late fireworks; the memo directed local board members to object to any expansion of early voting hours.
The early voting chaos was brought about when the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s Voter ID law in late July. The court wrote in its decision that the state had targeted African-American voters with “almost surgical precision” when crafting the Voter ID law, which had provisions limiting the number of days in the early voting period, while also eliminating same-day registration, out of precinct voting and preregistration of teenagers.
The United States Supreme Court also denied Governor Pat McCrory’s request for a stay of that Fourth Circuit ruling.
The state board is set to meet at 10 o’clock Thursday morning and will take public comment before ultimately deciding the early voting sites and hours for Orange County. That meeting will be held at 441 North Harrington Street in Raleigh. The public can also listen to proceedings by dialing (415) 655-0060, code 482-690-073, according to the state board.
There are easily 25 common areas in which one must show ID to participate in a myriad of public exercises ….yet the only one that is racist is in voting.